I have a confession to make, one that not even my closest friends have heard. Oh, the shame! But I’m among amiable strangers here, which makes it easier somehow. Remember my most recent completed manuscript, the English Civil War story set on Dartmoor in southern England? Well, my editor hates it.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration – his three-page editorial report suggests that he harbours some hope of salvaging a halfway decent story from the wreckage – but it’s the first time I’ve been faced with the prospect of a lot of rewriting for one of my scripts. Please, no aphorisms about pride coming before a fall or if at first you don’t succeed… The irony is, I’ve confronted my authors with this degree of revision many times over (the Purple Pen of Doom is merciless when someone fails to breathe sufficient magic into one of my storylines), and can shift effortlessly into cheerleader mode when it comes to boosting their morale and giving them a new burst of energy for knocking a script into shape.

But all I can think right now is, this is so unfair! To me, the story worked, the characters did pretty much what I wanted them to and, most important of all, I met my deadline. Why should I make a relatively minor character four years older just to avoid shocking readers with the reality that children as young as five were taken onto battlefields? Why do I have to spend more time explaining the causes and effects of the English Civil War? Why can’t there be two dramatic pony rescues from the military camp? I read the opening chapters out loud to one of my long-suffering companions and he thought it was brilliant. So there. Crash and thud. That’s the sound of me throwing all my toys out of the pram (in case that means nothing to you, I should explain that it’s a British expression for having a tantrum – think squawking two-year-old with arms flailing and pacifiers flying and you’ll get the general idea).

Apologies in advance for any incoherence in this post – I came back from New York three days ago and jetlag is sticking to me like glue. I don’t even feel perky in the evenings, it just feels like 4am all the time. It might be over-stimulation as well as international travel that’s pickling my […]

Allison’s first post (welcome, Allison!) was particularly interesting because I was planning to write about the role of autobiography in fiction for my next post: when we come up with new stories, are we spinning webs from thin air, or are we just rewriting our own experiences? This debate is hot in the British publishing […]

Marsha’s recent post made me think some more about my reputation for unhappy endings. Am I like her, realistically and maturely aware that life is untidy and doesn’t have chapter endings the way stories do? Or do I have a cynicism about life that means everything leads at best in circles, and more often nowhere? […]

Hello? Hello? Is there anybody there? *opens garret window and peers out* Can someone tell me what year it is? 2007? Already? Holy moly, I haven’t left my room since Halloween. At least, that’s what it feels like. The Book has been delivered. The deed is done and cannot be undone, as someone much more […]

I don’t like Christmas. In fact, I make Scrooge look like Santa. I don’t put up decorations (I think I’m allergic to the aesthetic properties of tinsel) and only grudgingly display cards, counting the days until I can reasonably take them down and dust the shelves whereon they stand; however, I have been known to […]

I have a confession to make: I feel like a total fraud when I talk about what it is to be a writer because 95% of my working life is taken up with being an editor. The writing bit gets squeezed into odd-shaped corners like evenings and weekends, until I have that two-weeks-before-deadline panic and […]

I’ve been following, with many a wince of sympathy, the comments on Marsha’s blog about what to do when you hit the metaphorical brick wall. We all suffer from it, though in my case it stems more often from succumbing far too easily to distraction – the lure of a packet of Maltesers, a sale […]

Even more than the lives of the feline Clans in Warriors, the YA fantasy line that I edit for Working Partners LTD, adult genre fiction can seem to be all about boundaries, fierce demarcations outlined in the marketing department’s blood. And when genres are mixed, readers know all about it before they even prise open […]